Unplug your kids - wrinkle

After being stuck inside for weeks due to extreme heat and then having to cope with another week of solid rain, Wombat really wasn't in the mood for much this week. We even bought him the DVD of Wall-E and allowed him to watch it during the daytime! But before you revoke my unplugged-mama status - when the inevitable demands for merchandising began, I redeemed myself by making a cardboard Wall-E, a (homemade) playdough Eve and a lego cockroach lol (I suggested making the cockroach out of pipecleaners, but I was overruled :P)



The only 'wrinkle' project we managed inside was when Wombat glued a picture of a puppy from a magazine onto a balloon. A few days later the balloon popped and Wombat said "The puppy is all wrinkled!" and then burst into tears! (May be a fun project to do with an older / less sensitive kid lol) No photos, as I had to quickly dispose of the evidence!


When we did finally manage to get outside, I tried to incorporate as many 'wrinkly' ideas as I could find. For example, we talked about how the pumpkin flowers were all wrinkled up tight in their buds, before stretching their petals out and unwrinkling!




And we sat for a while and watched the wind "wrinkling" the surface of the water on the dam.

Wombat was inspired to join in, and made a few 'wrinkles' of his own, with a long stick.

Meanwhile, Munchkin watched from the safety of the chinese babycarrier. The sudden cold change is really making his growing teeth painful, so he is not sleeping much at all, and much of my night is spent cuddling a screaming baby. Perhaps he was just joining in this week's project - seeing how many new wrinkles he could give his mother lol.

Can you believe these boys were running around naked for most of the past few weeks - and this week we have had the heater on every day!

You can join in the Unplugged Projects too, or just visit the other participants and see what great ideas they have! Next week's project is clothing!

Unplug your kids - float

We did three different activities for float, spread out over the whole week.

First, one very hot afternoon, I half-filled a tub with water and brought out Wombat's bowl of magnetic/non-magnetic objects. He did a little bit of sorting into floats/sinks but was much more interested in "sink" lol...



Then I showed him how some of the objects he had classified as 'sink' (a shell and a metal bell) would actually float if placed carefully on the surface of the water.



Other interesting explorations involved trying to sink something 'unsinkable' - the plastic shower curtain ring, which floated to the top each time it was sunk; trying to float something 'unfloatable' - the heavy spring, which floated in its jar-lid boat; and the half-and-half - the fuzzy yarn which floated until it got waterlogged and then sank.



The next 'float' activity involved a little preparation. I used some plastic packaging from a tray of custard tarts, and froze some very diluted watercolour paint.



Here are the frozen colours...



We then played with floating them in our tub of water and watching them melt.



I must admit, I probably found them more fascinating than Wombat - the way the colour had formed tree-like rings as it froze was very pretty...



Wombat had some fun swirling them and trying to sink them, and generally playing floating iceberg games...



for about five minutes... and then they were all melted away lol... (it was another VERY HOT afternoon)



On Monday we had a cool change, with a little rain, providing the perfect chance to get outside after more than a week of being cooped up by the heat. I wanted to make sure Wombat burned off as much energy as possible, so I 'floated' some balloons around the yard, tying them to trees and clotheslines with pipecleaners.



We played 'bop the balloon' with me yelling out "Bop the red balloon" etc. This gave us a chance to work on colour recognition too. Wombat is really good with his colours, but he tends to mix up blue/purple and pink/white so we will be working on those a bit more.



I tried to vary things a bit by suggesting jump, skip, walk backwards etc, but he wasn't interested in stepping outside his comfort zone, so I 'ordered' myself to do those things to show him what I meant. I didn't think he'd enjoyed the game all that much as he stopped following directions after a little while. I got him to direct me for a bit and then the game ended. When I took the balloons down, though, he insisted that he wanted to play again, so I think this is an activity we will keep and grow with over time.

You can see more great unplugged interpretations of float over at Unplug your Kids. Next week's project is: wrinkle.

Unplug your kids - colour

For colour, I started with the bright idea of making up the thicker powdered milk paint I mentioned last week, putting the three primary colours in bags and letting Wombat experiment with mixing them. Here he is mixing up the red. (Unfortunately, the thicker milk paint resulted in the same pastel effect that I get from cornflower, though it did have a great texture. I've still got a few more ideas on different things to try.)


The problem was, I didn't have any ziplock bags of a suitable size... so I used plastic lunchbags... and they broke, almost immediately.


Not to worry - we were prepared for a mess! We went ahead and mixed the blue and yellow the same way.

Then, we started to swirl on the newspaper. I showed Wombat how blue + yellow made green, blue + red made purple and red + yellow made orange.


"Great!" he said. "But I want to make brown!" So he did... and painted a wombat with pawprints all around it.


Wombat was ready to stop there, but I reminded him that all the paint we had mixed was going straight in the bin with the newspaper unless he wanted to use some more of it to do pictures with. Thus inspired, he went on to do some nice colourful swirly-whirling.



It has been super-hot this week, and we have been spending a lot of time inside, so our colour-projects didn't stop there.

We had recently taken the Christmas cards down from their ribbon in the kitchen and they were sitting in a pile on my desk. Normally, I keep them with the vague intention of sticking them in a scrapbook, which means I have many guilt-inducing boxes and bags of old cards lying around. In a moment of decluttering freedom, I handed them to Wombat with a pair of scissors to practice his cutting. He spent a lovely THREE hours, cutting them into little pieces. When I noticed how careful he was being, selecting and cutting around particular images, I decided to take the project one step further. I gave him an A4 size piece of contact (adhesive) plastic to stick them on. When he finally got tired of cutting and arranging his pieces (making sure none of them touched each other) I finished off the project by cutting little tiny pieces to fill in any gaps, making a very colourful tiled mosaic. (Wombat and I had fun working out the 'jigsaw' puzzle of where the little pieces fit best.) When we were satisfied that we couldn't fit anymore in, I stuck another piece of contact paper over the top and we taped it to the window where the sun could shine through it.


You'll have to excuse the lack of photos of the making of this masterpiece as the primary artist was enjoying working in the nude!

And no, we didn't stop there... we also got very colourful playing with the kaleidoscope Wombat got for Christmas. I was amazed to find that I could take photos by lining my camera up with the eyepiece. Here are some of my pics arranged in a (very quick) montage!


Next week's unplugged project is float.

Unplug your kids - ball

For this week's unplugged project, we combined a couple of activities I'd been reading about in the blogosphere - milk powder paint and marble painting.

I like using Stockmar watercolour paint which needs to be mixed for different colours, and diluted (the little bottles will stretch for ages if you do). In the past I have used just water, and a water & cornflour mix (this gives a great texture for fingerpainting, but really makes the colours pastel when they dry). I am always looking for something new to try, so this was a good experiment.

To make milk powder paint, mix equal amounts of skim milk powder and water, then add your colour. I used 1/2 cup of each, which made too much paint - it doesn't keep very well - you need a sealed jar in the fridge, so next time I will make less. Also, I am using a liquid paint instead of a powdered one, so it was a bit runnier than I wanted (why does a Monty Python skit suddenly start playing in my head? lol). Next time I will use a little less water as well. Other than that it turned out perfectly!

The red, blue and yellow are my basic colours; we mix them to make purple, green and orange as well. Wombat asked for two yellows. My paint palette is an old plastic microwave muffin 'tin'.

I lined a box with newspaper, put some A4 paper in and we splotted colour on with a spoon.

Then we added a marble (the ball for our project) and rolled it around.

One marble wasn't enough for Wombat, he threw in a few more and did some finger swirling for good measure.

All in all, a fun activity, though Wombat only wanted to do one picture (I think I was 'over-controlling' again... gotta learn to step back and let him experiment more.)

The paint dried well with a slightly glossy finish, and clean up was a breeze - the brushes and the palette washed clean really quickly - much easier than just the paint by itself lol.

Next week's Unplugged Project is : colour.

Unplug your kids - balance

The theme for this week's Unplug your Kids project was balance.

I had originally wondered about making our own set of scales, like this. However, that project was a bit beyond Wombat, and I think I will save it until he is older. We do have a set of balance scales, and I may get them out for some (carefully supervised) experimenting sometime this week. He loves to put an object on our kitchen scales and tell me that it weighs 58 kgs!

But back to balancing... while digging hunting for worms in the garden, Wombat kept frustrating me by walking along the brick edge. Each time he did it, a loose brick would overturn, hurting his foot and as a result I spent more time comforting him and rebuilding the edge than I did weeding! Finally, I decided, if you can't beat him, join him!

I found 16 clean bricks and two (almost) straight planks of wood lying around the yard, and with a bit of improvisation, we built a balance beam. It is just high enough off the ground to be a little challenging, but not enough to cause injury should he fall. I actually find it quite enjoyable to do the exercise myself (disregarding MIL's comment about walking the plank lol). The slight warp in the beams makes it a little more tricky, but I propped a few pieces of soft bark under the highest contact points to minimize wobbling. Wombat is really into building obstacle courses lately (after I built one for him on a whim a few months ago) so we are going to leave this set up and see what other ideas we can think of to add to it.

Wombat also came up with his own balance experiment - eating grapes from a bowl "just like a pussycat"!

Next week's unplugged topic is "ball".

Unplug your kids - square

My attempts to find a 'square' project that would interest Wombat were remarkably unsuccessful, and then I had a brainwave!

One of our most popular activities lately has been restarting a tiny raised-bed veggie garden. Several years ago, well before Wombat was born, Yeti and I built a number of large raised beds for growing our own produce. We had some wood left over, so Yeti put together this little SQUARE bed, right down the back. While the bigger beds were very productive, this one was used just for potatoes.

Then life intervened and gardening took a back seat for a while. The big beds became (and remain) hopelessly overgrown with kikuyu grass. Being down the back, almost in the bush, the little potato bed was below the kikuyu line and escaped the invasion. There it sat until Wombat and I decided to make it our own. We weeded, and spread a load of homemade compost. The pumpkin plant you can see in the front corner was a self-starter, from seeds in the compost.



In honour of the square project, I lugged the old welded-pipe frame down and Wombat and I gleefully planted blue lake runner beans. We also planted nasturtiums in the the other front corner. So far, we have three little bean seedlings. I shall be sure to post more pictures of them, once they are grown.



The raised-bed idea comes from the 'no-dig' gardening philosophy. It can even be used to create a garden on a concrete surface. In fact, beneath the bed you see in these photos there is a solid sheet of sandstone rock! As far as I know, the concept was pioneered by an Australian lady, Esther Dean, in the late 1970s. It is particularly effective in areas with low soil fertility and erosion problems. Instead of turning the soil to remove weeds (thus burying the weed seeds and perpetuating the problem), you simply smother them with layers of paper and straw, thus inviting the worms and other beneficial micro-organisms to aerate the soil and do the digging for you!

For a good-sized garden, you will need a frame, a bale of lucerne hay, a bale of straw, a bag of organic fertilizer or dry poultry manure, and some well-rotted compost.

The first step is to build a frame of some sort - you can use wood, as we have, or bricks (this is how my flower beds are built) or even recycle a frame from an old bed or table. The possibilities are endless. With a bit of imagination, you can even lift your raised bed up off the ground, making it accessible for those in wheelchairs or with other disabilities (Esther Dean does this by building a frame around an old bedstead and lining it with plastic before proceeding to the next step).

Once your frame is in place, you build the soil in layers. To construct a garden on hard rocky ground, first put down a three to four inch layer of old leaves, small sticks and bits if seaweed. If you are building your garden over an existing lawn or garden bed, you can omit this step and go straight to the newspaper.

Cover this with a layer of newspaper. (Avoid glossy advertising pages or thick cardboard as these will not break down properly.) It helps if you wet this layer before proceeding. The layer needs to be about quarter of an inch thick and make sure the newspaper is well overlapped to prevent any weeds popping through.

Cover the newspaper with pads of lucerne and sprinkle this lightly with the fertilizer. Next, add a layer of loose straw, about eight inches deep, with another sprinkle of fertilizer on top. Finally, spread a patch of compost about four inches deep and eighteen inches across where you plan to plant your seeds. Water after planting, and then as needed to keep the straw just damp.

Ms Dean suggests starting out with summer vegetables, such as zucchini, squash and pumpkin, at one end of the bed, and tucking some potatoes under the straw at the other end. This sets you up ready to rotate your crops by alternating a leafy vegetable with a root vegetable.

By the time your first crop is harvested, the straw will have broken down to form a lovely rich soil. To plant your next crop, just add a new layer of compost and off you go! (This is the stage Wombat and I are at with our square bed - there were only a few weeds that needed to be pulled out, then we added our compost layer and started planting. To recover the big beds, however, I am going to have to start again at the beginning.) Have fun and happy harvesting!

You can find more weekly inspiration over at Unplug Your Kids! The next challenge is "balance".

Unplug your kids - orange and wrapping paper

Monday is here again and although we have been doing the unplugged projects, I just haven't had the chance to upload the photos yet. I'll have to play catch-up.

Shhh, Joe, don't crow... "Yon light is not day-light, I know it, I..."

cue gratuitous Rooster pic:

I've done it again - but somehow, after staying up till 3am talking to Yeti and then trying to check email and blogs in between feeding Munchkin every other hour, and knowing that Wombat is going to wake up before 7am it just seems easier not to sleep at all :P

Enough sidetracking...

Last week's project was orange. I started with this sun idea from No Time for Flash Cards. (Since it's summer here, it's actually seasonally appropriate for us, which is a relief from all the snow projects.)

First, I traced Wombat's hand as many times as I could fit on a piece of orange construction paper. While I was cutting them out, I gave him all his orange markers, pencils and crayons and asked him to colour in the plate until there was no white showing.

When he got bored with that I gave him a piece of white paper so he could 'draw a picture' with the same orange colours. Then together we cut & ripped the leftover orange paper into small pieces and searched through a newspaper for orange. We I glued these pieces randomly onto another piece of white paper.

About this stage he got bored and wandered off to annoy Daddy, so I finished by tracing one of the orange handprints I'd already cut out onto the two decorated white sheets, cut out more handprints and glued them around the outside of the plate. When Wombat came back, I asked him to help me glue and sprinkle glitter on the plate.

We added a string, I took down our curly decoration and packed it away with the Christmas stuff, and we hung the orange sun in its place.



This is the back (and our overcrowded play area) - I had an orange handprint leftover, so I wrote Wombat's name and the date on it.


It's actually very bright and cheery - looks much better in person than it does in the pictures.

Wombat is hassling me to get him dressed and start the day, so I will let the wrapping paper project tell it's own story in pictures...

Now I'd better hurry up and think of something 'square' to do today!

Unplugged project - fluffy

I have been subscribed to Unplug your Kids for a while, but this is our first attempt at joining in. Read all about the logic behind the Unplugged Projects here.


This week's theme was "fluffy".


I just happened to have a pile of very fluffy feathers and pompoms lying around, with no particular plans for them. I made a quick bird shape out of our home made playdough, handed it to Wombat with a basket of fluffy things, and let him go to work.



I love the creativity of the pink crest - I wasn't expecting that! He told me it was a hen, and sat it on a black pompom egg. I was lucky to get the picture, though, as shortly afterwards the fluffy hen was tromped under a two-year-old's frustrated fist...